In October 1997, just as El Niņo was getting ready to soak California with one of the
wettest winters ever, nearly 150 climate modeling experts from around the world convened
at Berkeley Lab to discuss advances in using computers to study, model and predict weather
patterns.

At the meeting, hosted by the Lab's National Energy Research Scientific Computing
Division (NERSC), scientists demonstrated that their tools for predicting weather are
getting more reliable and extending the range of forecasts.

This image reveals the
abnormally warm Pacific Ocean surface temperatures (shown in red) associated with El
Niņo. Computer scientists at NERSC are working with the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics
Laboratory to adapt climate modeling codes to run on more powerful massively parallel
processor supercomputers to more accurately predict climate changes.

Still, the need for better modeling
tools was also made clear. More accurate models lead to more precise forecasts, which in
turn can help save lives and resources as people have more time to prepare for severe
storms. One way of doing this is by adapting the best current tools to run on the most
powerful computers available.

To do this, the Department of Energy's Biological and Environmental Research Program
recently announced that it will fund a joint climate research project between NERSC and
the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) to investigate how widely used climate
models can be run effectively and efficiently on massively parallel processing
supercomputers. Such computers, called MPP machines, are able to handle large jobs more
quickly by dividing codes into smaller units and running them in parallel, thereby taking
minutes or hours to process data that once required days or weeks to run. Using such
machines, climate researchers can also include more data points in their simulations,
thereby producing more detailed and accurate results.

NERSC will focus initially on the Modular Ocean Model developed at the GFDL, and
investigate additional models later. As improvements are made in the codes, NERSC will
work closely with the model developers at GFDL to incorporate the improvements into the
models. For more climate modeling visualizations visit the